Home Again: A Photo Essay

A long time coming, it came like a winter flood. After six months idling in the backwaters, our house sold one day, and it carried us away for a month.

Only a month? My body says a year.

My body says: go for a walk. A sanity-preserving suggestion.

We’ve landed in a gangly elbow of the Portland metro, a ragged cluster of office buildings and corporate-looking apartments, crooked between the wash and the roar of freeway. It’s loud, but it’s just this side of country. And it has its charms, up close.

Even better: if I climb steeply for five minutes, my boots sigh onto the soft, non-native grasses of one of the last remaining patches of Willamette oak savanna.

I’ve opened this gift nearly every day since the last box landed.

It’s literally the same few trails. A half an hour’s brisk loop. They make new conversation every day, though. Already they have changed their clothes for winter. Always moving forward. Yes, I’m listening.

Anna’s hummingbirds give chase, screaming in their tiny whirring voices. Towhees shout down the endless cars. Leaves plummet, pivoting around their spotted galls. I’m told that if I find a hole the right size in the hillside, I’ll know where a mother coyote raised her pups.

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One thought on “Home Again: A Photo Essay”

I love you, and I really like the place you presently call home. Thank you for sharing this portion of the oak savanna with me when we were visiting earlier this month. A treasure, a beautiful, haunting treasure. And the views…standing at the top of the hill looking out over the surrounding buildings, the landscape, the River and on southeast to the fertile fields of the Willamette Valley…on and on in the distance until it merges with the horizon. Wonderful!